Dr. Anthony Fauci is urging colleges not to send students home that become infected with the Chinese coronavirus on campus.
“It’s the worst thing you could do,” said Fauci in a Wednesday with NBC’s Today Show. “When you send them home, particularly when you’re dealing with a university where people come from multiple different locations, you could be seeding the different places with infection.”
Fauci’s sentiments arrive amid universities around the country seeming to take the opposite approach, by closing residence halls and sending students home over concerns of Wuhan virus breakouts on campus.
“Sending these individuals back home in their asymptomatic state to spread the virus in their hometown or among their vulnerable households could really re-create what we experienced over the June time frame in the South,” said Dr. Deborah Birx on a Monday call with governors, according to Today.
The report added that on Wednesday, a group of students and faculty members at the University of Iowa — which has seen nearly 1,000 positive tests for the Chinese virus in the past two weeks — planned a “sickout” over concerns about “the rampant spread” of the Wuhan virus on campus.
“As students and educators, we have seen firsthand that there is no safe way to hold classes in person during this pandemic,” the group claimed.
Meanwhile, the University of Notre Dame announced it had canceled in-person classes for at least two weeks after reporting 80 new coronavirus cases.
“Some colleges have the capability of a dorm or a couple of floors of a dorm where they could keep people who are infected,” said Fauci.
“Keep them at the university in a place that’s sequestered enough from the other students so that you don’t get a cluster in the university, but don’t have them go home, because they could be spreading it in their home state,” he added.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.
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